Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images; Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu via Getty Images
- House Speaker Mike Johnson is splitting Ukraine and Israel aid into separate votes.
- Democrats have generally opposed this, but are now willing to go along with it.
- But progressive Democrats — who increasingly oppose Israel aid — are cheering the move.
House Speaker Mike Johnson's unconventional plan to hold separate votes on Israel and Ukraine aid is designed primarily to appease House Republicans who don't want to vote for more aid to Ukraine.
But it's also garnering applause from an unusual place: progressive Democrats who don't want to vote for more Israel aid.
"I think it is a great plan," said Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who supports Ukraine aid but won't vote for unconditional Israel aid. "I think it is disastrous to give a single dime to the Israeli military without conditions at this moment. It's almost immoral."
Omar is among the nearly 20 House progressives who have refused to sign onto a so-called "discharge petition" to force a House vote on the $95.3 billion national security supplemental, which passed the Senate in February and includes more than $60 billion for Ukraine and more than $14 billion for Israel.
Since the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, the Biden administration, GOP and Democratic Senate leadership, and most House Democrats have supported pairing Ukraine and Israel aid together, under the theory that the inclusion of Israel aid would incentivize Republicans to approve more Ukraine aid. Republicans, hoping to avoid having to vote on Ukraine and Israel aid together, have made numerous attempts to separate the two.
But in the intervening months, the politics of Israel have changed dramatically on the left.
Polling has shown that a large number of Democratic voters view Israel's war in Gaza — which has killed nearly 34,000 Palestinians — as a genocide, while hundreds of thousands of voters have cast "uncommitted" ballots in Democratic presidential primaries across the country to protest Biden's support for Israel. Many Democratic lawmakers have increasingly come around to the view that aid to Israel must be conditioned in order to avoid US weapons being used to facilitate potential human rights violations.
That's led some progressives to refuse to get on board with the Senate-passed bill, even if they support Ukraine aid.
"I am opposed to the supplemental and I do not want to see it passed," Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told Business Insider in February.
In the absence of those conditions on Israel aid, progressive Democrats have increasingly pushed for the very thing their Republican counterparts have long sought: separate votes.
"We pushed for it, so I'm grateful that's happening," said Omar.
Both Israel and Ukraine aid — along with a bill to provide aid to Taiwan and another bill that includes a bill to force the sale of TikTok — are likely to pass. But the coalitions required for each will be different: Ukraine will get mostly Democratic support, while Israel will get more GOP support.
Rep. Ro Khanna of California, another progressive Democrat who did not sign the discharge petition, noted that he's long supported the idea of single-subject bills — an idea long favored by House Republicans as well.
"Good for Johnson for sticking to that basic principle," said Khanna. "Let people vote on Taiwan, let them vote on Ukraine, let them vote on Israel."
Democrats have generally been amenable to Johnson's plan, and may even need to help the Republican speaker with procedural steps to get it to the floor. They may also end up protecting him from an effort by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to oust him as a result.
But that doesn't mean they like the plan as much as progressives.
"It's kind of a mind-bendingly complicated process for something that has a simple solution," said Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, who prefers the Senate-passed bill. "How could they overcomplicate the most simple thing possible?"
And it still remains to be seen if the plan makes it to the floor. Hard-right Republicans have only grown more angry with Johnson as the week has dragged on, with some of them protesting a potential effort to make it harder for lawmakers to call for votes to oust the speaker.